The portal opened on a hot, still afternoon near the estate's edge, spinning a slow clockwise wound into the air above the garden, its rim glowing a faint, alternating violet. Elias, bored with a book of old poems, felt the hum of it before he saw it — a burst of Flow like a held breath finally releasing.
He climbed onto the window seat for a better look. Two people stepped out of the swirling middle. A man, perhaps his father's age, with dirty-blond hair and green eyes that looked oddly, distractingly familiar — the same shade, he realized with mild surprise, as his mother's. And beside him, a girl of perhaps seven, platinum-haired and green-eyed as well, dressed — bafflingly, for someone who apparently mattered enough to travel by portal — as a maid.
She looked up, as if she'd felt him watching. Their eyes met through the glass, and something in her gaze was so cold, so far past her apparent age, that Elias actually flinched back a half-step before he caught himself.
A maid who glares like she's collecting a debt, he thought, smoothing his tunic with both hands.
'Fine. Let's go be charming at these people and figure out what they want.'
Down in the entrance hall, the servants had already gathered in a murmuring knot, whispering about the sudden portal and the powerful new arrivals. The girl stood beside the man like a small, silent statue — face bored, arms folded neatly behind her back — until her gaze landed on Elias descending the staircase and swept him head to toe with an expression that could only be described, generously, as unimpressed. She rolled her eyes.
Something flickered there too, though, half a second before the eye-roll — something that might have been a wince, or a flicker of recognition, quickly buried under the ice. Elias, mid-bow, nearly missed it entirely. He filed it away anyway, out of habit. People didn't accidentally soften and then work that hard to stop.
"Is that the boy?" the man asked, pointing, his voice direct and a little rough around the edges, as though good manners were a language he understood but rarely bothered speaking.
"Yes, Master," said Mrs. Gable, bowing with a nervous flutter of her apron.
"The young master, Elias Linford Dukker."
The man's eyes narrowed — not unkind, exactly, but sharp, weighing, the way a merchant looks at a horse before deciding whether it's worth the asking price. The girl did the same, quick and clinical, and then, to Elias's private annoyance, rolled her eyes again, as if he'd already failed some test he hadn't been told he was taking.
"The hell," Elias thought, a flicker of genuine irritation sparking through the calm he'd spent years cultivating. He smiled anyway — wide, guileless, the exact smile Lady Elara had told him made him look like a perfect little cherub — and finished his descent.
"Greetings. I am Elias Linford Dukker. It is a pleasure to meet you both." He kept his voice clear and polite, exactly as taught, and watched their faces for any reaction at all.
The man grunted, unmoved by manners entirely. "Where are his parents?"
"Both away until evening, sir," Mrs. Gable answered quickly. "Lord Alaric is in the capital on urgent business, and Lady Elara is running errands within the territory."
The man's mouth flattened. He clearly wasn't pleased by that answer — and then, without further preamble of any kind, closed the distance in two long strides and hauled Elias bodily off his feet, tucking him under one arm like a sack of very confused, very small potatoes.
'Excuse you,' Elias thought, genuinely outraged even as his legs kicked uselessly in the air, 'this is a kidnapping. A noble child. Some decorum, please.'
The man carried him through the manor's maze of halls without a single wrong turn — which was, Elias noted through his indignation, its own small and slightly worrying mystery — and out into the sunlit back lawn, where he deposited Elias unceremoniously on the grass and stepped back a few paces, hands loose at his sides, as if waiting for something.
"What in the—" Elias started, wobbling upright.
A wave of raw, crushing Flow slammed into him from nowhere, like being struck by lightning with no warning thunder first. The world went white and then simply stopped being anywhere at all.
'Oh,' Elias thought, distantly, with real and slightly weary déjà vu. 'Did I die again? Kind of anticlimactic, honestly, given the circumstances.'
He woke to his mother's voice, furious in a register he'd genuinely never heard from her before.
"Brother! What in the world was that? You nearly killed my son!"
The man — Uncle Ortis, apparently, and evidently unbothered by having very nearly murdered his nephew — offered a shrug so casual it was practically an insult in physical form. "A test of his awakening. Nothing more. My own daughter is something of a prodigy herself, you know. I simply wished to see who's better." He said the last part slightly too quietly to be entirely an accident, and gestured vaguely at the girl, as if her mere presence explained the whole affair.
"What does Aina being a prodigy have to do with anything?" Lady Elara demanded, hands on her hips, radiating the specific fury reserved for family.
Elias, wobbling back upright with his mother's help, studied the girl again. Still glaring at him. Still, somehow, dressed as staff, despite apparently being important enough to warrant international portal travel.
"Why is she dressed like a maid?" he wondered, filing the question away with the others.
"Uncle Ortis," Elias managed once introductions had finally been extracted from an exasperated Lady Elara, offering his best small, formal bow, "and Cousin Aina. A pleasure to meet you both."
Aina scoffed — an actual, audible scoff — and turned to follow her father inside without so much as a backward glance.
Elias glared after her, thoroughly unimpressed in return.
'Curse this world,' he thought, 'and its extremely aggressive relatives.'